Tee to Green

Golf leading world out of lockdown

Who’d have thought it? Crusty, elitist, boring old golf is leading the sports world out of the coronavirus lockdown. At both local and elite levels, as well. Being fortunate enough to already embrace a key aspect of virus prevention – social distancing – allowed the game to restart before almost every other sporting activity, and it reaped a dividend.

For the first time in more than two decades, club membership and participation are going up. We’d much rather a potentially deadly pandemic hadn’t led to this, but it is what it is, as a philosopher from Jupiter, Florida, is so fond of saying.

It doesn’t mean a boom – the collapse in visitor traffic, especially American tourists, will have a profound effect on some prominent places which perhaps became too dependent on it – but it’s a foundation on which to perhaps build a stabler future for the sport.

The cull of clubs I confidently predicted in these columns a couple of weeks into lockdown may not now happen at all.

In the elite game, golf has also led the way. Despite a few hiccups to start (what were they doing allowing untested people onsite?) the PGA Tour now appears to have come upon a properly safe environment to continue to play.

The attitude to the virus is clearly different in the US to here in Europe, where in the main an elimination strategy is strictly applied, even if some governments (like England’s) aren’t following it.

The US, with no States singing off the same hymn sheet and an utter lack of cohesive national strategy, means there’s always extra risk for a sports organisation hopping around the country. But the Tour has faced that down and done reasonably well, so far, although it’s yet to venture into one of the newly developed hotspots.

I wouldn’t join in the cheerleading for Jay Monahan just yet, but it seems the commissioner is now the go-to guy for advice to the major sports in America looking to get back up and running.

It’s been patchy so far – there’s been positives aplenty in baseball, which has just restarted in the last week. The acid test is the NFL, the biggest game in the biggest sports market in the world, and how their 32 training camps with 80 players each manage to contain the virus when they open in a few days.

Here, the European Tour unveiled their safety plan to the world at the British Masters last week, and speaking to chief medical officer Dr Andrew Murray it’s clear the extent of collaboration going on in the sports world. It was maybe fortunate – or

“Only time will tell whether Close House was watertight against the virus but the Tour left no obvious gaps

perhaps prescient – for the Tour that Dr Murray has a background in public health and had a grip of the nuts and bolts.

The Tour’s super-strict bubble was his and his staff’s construction, and it felt rigorous and comfortingly safe to be within it at Close House and the secured accommodation last week, especially for people on their first trip away from home for four months.

The Tour are sharing best practice all over the place, with cricket, who got their bubble up and running first for the ongoing West Indies Test tour, with Formula One, who stepped back into the breach in Austria earlier this month, and with others.

Dr Murray publicly praised the football and rugby authorities in Scotland – not a common occurrence, it has to be said – for their safety plans in getting players back to training.

Only time will tell whether Close House was watertight against the virus – it took a week before the positives manifested themselves on the PGA Tour – but from what I saw the Tour left no obvious gaps for it to sneak through.

What was pretty clear, however, is that this is where we’re going to be for some time. The Tour’s strict health safety operation will be installed at every event probably well into 2021 and for some events – the newly cancelled Dunhill Links – it’s just unfeasible.

We might see a handful of hospitality or VIP spectators onsite, possibly at the Scottish Open and the PGA Championship at Wentworth in October, but mass attendance seems out.

Fans won’t be at the Women’s Open at Royal Troon in three weeks, the PGA Championship in San Francisco next week or the US Open at Winged Foot that follows. The PGA Tour have already said they won’t open the gates for their Fedex play-offs.

Which just leaves Augusta, due to host the postponed Masters in November. Augusta National’s resources and their ability to move literally earth if not quite heaven means that all things are possible.

But given Georgia is struggling with the virus now, it seems unlikely that the usual numbers will be in the grounds, if any at all. One wouldn’t underestimate the will of ANGC, but one would suspect they’ll have the tapes of bird noise turned up more than usual.

It’s not ideal, by any means – elite sport really needs mass participation, as anyone who has watched the football in recent weeks will attest.

But we’re playing, and at the moment, that’s more than enough.

Picture: PA. A spectator-free Close House during the Betfred British Masters, which looks likely to be the norm for the rest of 2020.